Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Security Checklist


This list is mainly for developers, but can be useful also for architects, security managers and testers. Mainly from design and coding perspective, enriched with configuration, operational and human process aspects.

Please see also "Web services security threats": http://soa-java.blogspot.nl/2012/09/web-service-security-threats.html

This is a part of the blog series about (SOA) software guidelines. For the complete list of the guidelines (i.a. about design, security, performance, operations, database, coding, versioning) please refer to: http://soa-java.blogspot.nl/2012/09/soa-software-development-guidelines.html

General design principles

• Prefer to use policy based declarative security instead of programmatic security: separation between security configuration and business code. Beware that both business code and the security configuration typically have different life cycles and implemented/managed by different people.
• Use declarative security instead of programative, separation between application logic and the cross-cutting concerns (e.g. security, logging).
• Prefer to use message level / end-to-end security (e.g. WSS) than transport level / point-to-point security (e.g. SSL): to protect the messages in the intermediate services and flexibility to protect only portions of the messages (due to performance).
• Does the service/data need authentication, authorization, signature/non-repudiation, encryption?
• If the web service is used to wrap a legacy service: aware about vulnerabilities of the legacy service, aware about how to reconcile the security model (e.g. credentials/roles mapping) or some legacy application doesn't have any security provisioning at all
• Use white lists instead of black lists
 Throttling the requests / messages-size to prevent DoS
• Defense in depth: don't rely on a single layer of security (e.g. apply also authentication & SSL instead of protecting the infrastructure with firewall only)
Check at the gate (e.g. validate and authenticate early)
• Secure the weakest link
Compartmentalize: isolate and contain problems e.g. firewall/DMZ, least privileged accounts, root jail.
• Secure by default e.g. close all ports unless it's necessary
• Communicate the assumptions explicitly e.g. firewall will secure all our internal services with no ports open to outside world
• Understand how the infrastructure restriction (e.g. firewall filtering rules, supported protocol, ports allowed) will affect your design
• Understand the organizational policies/procedure (e.g. what applications and users are allowed to do) so you don't have acceptance problem by production team because your services breach these policies
• Understand the deployment topology due to your organization structure (e.g. your company has many remote branches offices connected to the main server-farm via VPN)
• Understand the identity propagation / credential mapping across trust boundaries (e.g. apache web account >  weblogic web service account  > database account)
Security measures (e.g. authentication, encryption, signing) will cost performance (increasing processing cost and message size) as well as other qualities attributes such as usability, maintainability (e.g. distribution of certificates) and operability (e.g. security service / identity provider failure). So consider the trade off between security and other quality attributes regarding your company infrastructure and policies (e.g. if the firewall policy in your company is very strict, you might lessen the encryption requirement for the intern services).
• While applying security by design, I still keep the "security through obscurity" to some extent, e.g. I will not publicly publish the security architecture of my company (the endpoints/ports, wsdl/schema, libraries used, etc).


Security process & management


• Design & code review (e.g. login & logout mechanism, authorization logics in each Struts actions)
• Include security in your development process (e.g. SDL), use thread modeling during analysis & design phase.
• Make sure that your programmers and network/servers administrators capable to deal with security issues, arrange training if necessary.
• Make sure that the operational team know the contingency procedure (e.g. what to do in case of DoS attack or virus spreading in your network). Have contingency plan / crisis management document ready: procedures to where the configurations are, how to isolate, handle failures, how to restart in safe mode, how to turn-on/turn-off/undeploy/deploy modules/services/drivers, who/how to get informed, which services/resources have priorities (e.g. telephony service, logging service, security services).  Have this document in multiple copies in printed version (the intranet and printer may not work during crisis). The crisis team should have exercised the procedures (e.g. under simulated DOS attack) and measured the metrics during the exercise (e.g. downtime, throughput during degradation mode).
• Plan team vacation such that at least one of the crisis team member always available. Some organizations need 24/7 full time dedicated monitoring & support team.
• Hire external party for penetration testing and security audit.
• Document incidents (root causes, solutions, prevention, lesson to learn), add the incident handling procedures to the crisis management document.
• Establish architecture policies for your department. Establish a clear role who will guard the architecture policies and guidelines e.g. the architects using design/code review.
• For maintainability & governance: limit the technologies used in the projects. Avoid constantly changing technology while still open to the new ideas. Provide stability for developers to master the technology.
• Establish change control. More changes means more chances of failures. You might need to establish a change committees to approve the change request. A change request consists of why, risks, back-out/undo plan, version control of configuration files, schedule. Communicate the schedule with the affected parties before.


 Authentication

• Prefer to use stronger authentication (e.g. 2-way X.509 certificate authentication) than basic authentication (password based).
• If you use basic authentication use SSL or password digest to protect the password.
Credentials, authentication token / password are stored with encryption / salted hash
• Force users to use strong password and/or multi factor authentication. Use password expiration feature.
Avoid to send passwords to external application (e.g. when an external application need to access resource services), use OAuth instead.
 Disable test and example accounts.
Credentials (e.g. password, service accounts) are centralized (e.g. in an LDAP server) for better manageability. Redundancy (e.g. fail-over clusters) can be used to prevent single point of failures.
• If you use certificate based certification: always check the validity of the certificates (e.g. using CRL).
• Prevent brute-force / dictionary attacks (e.g. for add a new user webpage) using CAPTCHA, email validation, locking after max-attempts.
• Using SSO / centralized security service: users don't have to have many accounts/passwords, users don't have to share their passwords with many applications/resources, the developers don't have to maintain multiple authentication mechanisms in different systems. With federated Identity provider, you can centralized the credentials across organizations.
• Use standard security solutions (e.g. OAuth, OpenID, SAML to exchange security messages), don't reinvent new wheels. It's more risky to implement your own security solution than using a well tested solution.
• Authentication should be in the server side (instead of client side/JavaScript).
• Avoid having password as plain text in the configuration files (e.g. fstab), save passwords in the password files / credentials files and protect these files (chmod 600 and encryption if possible).
• Beware with remote OS authentication for example in Oracle database since an attacker can try to connect using a username that has the same name with the OPS$account in the database.
• Send confirmation when a user change his/her password, email, mobile or other sensitive personal data.


Session management

• Limit the life time of cookie or authentication/authorization tokens.
• Prevent replay attack by using one time nonce.
• Prevent CSRF using secret nonce as a request parameter (e.g. for OAuth) and validate the nonce in the server side, beware that a nonce cookie doesn't prevent CSRF.  Prevent CSRF by informing the user about the action (e.g. "you're about to transfer $100") and ask for reconfimation/reauthentication.
Session ID is strongly random generated, at least 128 bits length.
• Appropriate logout mechanisms (e.g. invalidate sessions, clear all cookies).
• Force user to re-authenticate for sensitive operations (e.g. change password).
Hide sessionID (e.g. in secure cookies instead of in GET url parameter or hidden form field).
• Validate the security token with HMAC or encrypt the token e.g. session ID cookies must be encrypted / using HttpOnly secure cookies.
• Limit the cookies domain & path.
• Always provide logout feature. Make sure that logout is properly done (invalidate session, remove session cookies).
• Issue a new session id for each login action (to prevent session fixation).
• Identify possible session hijacking for multiple IP addresses / geolocation which are simultaneously use the same sessionID.
• Use anti caching http header (Cache-Control: no-cache and  Pragma: no-cache).
• Use IE HttpOnly to prevent client (java)scripts query the cookies.
• Set the session timeout.
• Appropriately handle requests which indicate security check circumvention or an obvious attempt for privilege escalation,e.g. in case of requests with invalid sessionID: log the sender's IP address, invalidate the session and redirect to login page.

Authorisation

• Determine which web service operations or which web page/actions need authorization.
• Determine the privilege/roles for your service/web.
• Strong ACL (in operating system/file system level, application level, servers).
• Apply the least privilege principle, don't use admin account for daily operations (e.g. read database), create specific accounts for specific operations (e.g. CreditcardReadOnlyAccount, UpdateInventoryAccount, WebShopInventoryReadOnlyAccount).
Audit/log administrator activities (e.g. create new user, grant).
• Remove the default accounts & ACL in your system if possible (e.g. remove BUILTIN/Administrators group from SQL Server login) or rename the default (administrative) accounts if possible (e.g. sa user  in SQLServer).
• Run the server in root jail.
Centralized authorization (e.g. using OAuth) to reduce the burden of reconciling different access-right in different systems across trust-boundaries (e.g. apache  role=boss mapped to database role =  readwriteEmployeeData).
• Using ACL on URL tree and web methods allowed e.g. the REST url http://myweb.kom/myprofile should only be accessible for me & myfriends only for GET method and for me only for the PUT method.
• Use ACL to protect directory and files from transversal attack.
• Use ACL per user/session to filter direct & undirect references (e.g. links).
 Authorization check in all protected GUI operations (e.g. Struts-actions, Admin html page) and web service operations.
• Beware of the system calls feature in your framework that can be used for hostile purposes, e.g. Runtime.exec() in Java or store procedure xp_cmdshell in SQLServer. Solution: root jail, least privelege accounts, ACL, disable unnecessary features, run the application server with read-only privilege on web-root directory (e.g. Apache  nobody user).
• Make sure account lockout doesn't result in DoS.
 Check (e.g. using a white-list) all references submitted via input (e.g. webservice request, file, database).
• Avoid url-jumping (e.g. Checkout -> Delivery instead of Checkout -> Payment -> Delivery) by checking the last visited page (e.g. in session variable ).
• Remove guest account / anonymous login if it's not really needed. At least review the guest / public account, remove unnecessary privileges from this account.
 Review the ACL (& authentication credential lists) regularly to detect forgotten change actions (changed roles, departed employees)


Confidentiality, Encryption, Signing

• Encrpt/hash sensitive data e.g. bank-accounts in the LDAP production copy used for development/test.
• Use message-level XML-Encryption to protect sensitive data in the intermediaries / external proxies / clouds. The point-to-point SSL doesn't prevent the intermediaries to read the sensitive data. With WS-Encryption it's also possible to encrypt only a part of the messages, thus more flexible (e.g. in case the intermediary proxy need to peek the unencrypted part). The message-level security (e.g. WSS Authentication, XML-Encryption, XML-Signature) is independent to the protocols thus it offers more flexibility to send SOAP messages across different protocols (e.g. http, jms, ftp).
• Use signature and saved logs for non-repudiation
• Use signature for message integrity
• Protect the key (e.g. don't backup the key and the encrypted data in the same backup-tape)
• Use well-proven encryption algorithms (e.g. AES) in well-proven libraries instead of inventing and implementation your own algorithm.
• Don't register sensitive services to UDDI
• Use robot.txt to avoid the sensitive files (e.g. WSDL, source codes, configuration files, confidential documents)  appears in Google.
• Don't store secrets in the client side (e.g. hidden form field, cookies, HTML5 storage). If you really need to store sensitive data in the client (or to pass them in the message): obfuscate the name and encrypt/hash the value. Beware of persistent cookies (the information will be written to the file system hence can be read by malicious users)
• Secure backup (e.g. with encryption), store it in a secure place.
• Avoid mixed SSL - nonSSL web sites (it causes user warning in the browser and can expose user ID.) Use CA-valid certificates (to avoid user warning in the browser).
• An example of deployment pattern: using DMZ proxy servers between outer and inner firewall to expose (enterprise) services to public. The servers in de DMZ are treated as bastion hosts, special attentions are given to protect these servers against attacks.
• Load sensitive data on demand, clear them from memory as long as you don't need them anymore. Don't keep/save them (e.g. in session variables or cache) if it's not really necessary.
• Use enough key size. Securely distribute, manage and store the keys. change the keys periodically.

Coding

 Limit accessibility: e.g. declare classes/methods/fields as private instead of public
• Declare sensitive classes/methods/fields as final so they can't be overwritten
• Don't write secrets in the code (e.g. database connection string), beware that the secret strings in the compiled classes can still be read using reverse engineering tools
• Remove test code, example code, example database
• Using framework/library functions can be more safe than building your own function (e.g. using jquery .ajax to process json response from ajax calls instead of plainly using eval). But make sure that the third-party libraries that you use is save (e.g. code review) and follow the security newsgroup for that library.
• Use jsp comment tag instead of html comment to avoid the code comments will be visible to the client
• Use prepared statement for querying database to protect against sql injection (and better performance).
• If you need to redirect via url parameter consider using mapping value instead of the actual url link. Make sure that the redirect url is valid and authorized for the user.
• Beware of null insertion, e.g. circumvent  if ($user ne "root) using user="root/0" in Perl. Solution: validate inputs.
• Beware of buffer overflow attack (e.g. to override variables / operation address, DoS attack). Solution: use programming language/frameworks which is more safe regarding buffer overflow (e.g. Java), bounds checking
• Beware of race condition exploitation for example to overwrite the username of another individual's session. Solution: avoid sharing variable between sessions via global variables / files / database /registry entry.
• Use CAPTCHA to distinguish genuine human inputs from robot inputs.

Configuration / operation management

• Protect / restrict access to configuration files & admin interfaces.
Encrypt/hash sensitive configuration data (e.g. database connection, password).
 Centralized security management (e.g. OPSS for Oracle Fusion Middleware, JAAS for java applications) instead of managing different configurations spreading from GUI, web services, database.
• To prevent DOS attack: restrict message size (e.g. default 10MB in Weblogic) and set server timeout. It's better to countermeasure DOS as early as possible (e.g. in the firewall/gateway with Cisco rate limit) before the load balancers & application servers.
• Run application-servers/database/ldap with minimum privilege, avoid running the server as root.
• Reduce attack surface: disable unnecessary daemons, ports, users/groups, apache-modules, network storages in the server. Disconnect network file servers if it's not necessary
• Update the OS/applicativon-servers/database/Ldap/libraries with latest (security) patch
• Remove the temporary files (e.g. hibernate.properties.old or httpd.conf.bak)
• Audit/scan regularly for new vulnerabilities. It's not enough to do penetration test only during the first acceptance-test since the attack surface can grow with time.
• Follow the security newsgroups/websites (e.g. BugTraq), discuss the potential new threats with your security manager.
• Monitor the system lively for early detection of anomalies (e.g. multiple malicious logins from a certain IP address, unusual frequent web/soap requests to a certain url). Use Intrusion Detection System (IDS).
• Change the default application ports. Close the unnecessary ports with firewall.
• Minimize the allowed IP address source by using firewall, Apache httpd file, Weblogic connection filter.
• Use separate environments  production, test, development, sandbox playground (e.g. to test prototype or try new viral algorithms.) Each components in these environments have different credentials than in other environment. If the data in the test & development are based on production data (to make the test more realistic) the sensitive production data should be masked.
• The (security) test configuration should be identical to the production (e.g. firewall configurations, networks topology, timeout setting), for example you can use VMWork's LabManager to achieve this.
• Hide server information in http header (e.g ServerSignature Off in apache.conf).
• Turn off http trace feature (e.g. using Apache mod_rewrite), turn off debugging feature in production.
• Centralized security management (e.g. in case of Weblogic infrastructure: using OWSM with security policies) for  better manageability, reduce mistake.
• Use configuration change detection system (e.g.  monitor admin activities log files, Tripwire.)

Data

Minimum data presented to any business request
• Don't blindly trust input data (from clients GUI/cookies, database, web service request), so always validate and sanitize the input
• Validate/preprocessing (to prevent code/SQL/command injections, XSS, DoS) in sequence:
    o canonization: transform different representation (e.g. %5c is "/" which can be used for directory transversal attack)  to a canonical form.
    o sanitation: encode/escape unwanted characters (e.g. &lt for <).
    o data validation: validate based on white lists (e.g. XSD that defines data type/format/range).
• To prevent DoS, XML bomb: limit input size (e.g. web service request, file upload via GUI) using gateway/server configuration, XSD restriction length, limit nested element deep, don't use maxoccurs="unbounded" in XSD. While we can also limit the message using application-server setting or XSD validation in the proxy, it's better to reject the messages  as early as possible (e.g. in the gateway with XML firewall) before the message burden the load balances and application-servers.
• No security decision based on url params (which can be manipulated by clients).
• Validate & sanitize output (e.g. web, database) to prevent XSS, code injections.
• Use output encoding for special characters (to prevent XSS, code injections).
• Beware of double-encode attack (e.g. \  > %25 > %255c  ).
• Do not store sensitive data in cookies.
• How to validation data input (from user input, database, external system)? How to handle validation-error situation?
• Avoid sensitive data in de code/scripts, config files, log files. Restrict access to these files (least privelege principle).
• Encrypt sensitive data (e.g. employees' bank account published by LdapService).
• How do you prevent data fishing (e.g. limit output)?
• Use XML-firewall: faster (dedicated hardware), delegate the burden of SOA/OSB servers for validation.  Reject the messages earlier for better containment and preserving performance: threat should be addressed at the edge of the network instead of at the application layer.
• Reject SOAP message with <!ENTITY> tag (or whole DTD tag) or  use SOAP 1.2 to protect against entity attacks.
• Reject SOAP message with CDATA to avoid CDATA injection.
Attachment/files upload:
    o limit the size
    o the files must never be executed/evaluated
    o anti virus check

Error handling

• Prevent sensitive information (e.g. server fingerprinting for hackers) in the error messages. Generalized error message (to hide the implementation technology) instead of just passing the original error string from the framework (e.g. Java stacktrace).
• Don't put human information (e.g. developer's name) in the error message to avoid social engineering exploit.
• Test and understand the behavior of your system in case of failure / error.
• Catch all possible errors / failures  and handle gracefully to avoid DoS.
• Appropriate privilege level is restored in case of error / failure e.g. invalidate the session
Security mechanism is still working in case of error / exceptions / DoS attack
• Release resources (e.g. file, database pool) in case of error to prevent DoS.
• Centralized error handling.

Logging

• Log and monitor sensitive operations (e.g. create user, transfer money).
Protect log files / other files (e.g. history) which can be useful for forensic investigation using ACL, use signature if necessary.
No sensitive information (e.g. password) in the log, check the regulations (e.g. SOX in the US, WBP in the Netherlands).
• Information in log: userID, action/event, date/time (normalized to one time zone), IP address.
Throttling the log to prevent DoS or  evidence removal using log file rotation.
• Centralized logging and standardized the logging information.
• Audit logging regularly to detect malicious attempts using an automatic alert system. What information need to observe signs of malicious activities? e.g. number of connections per requester IP address.
• Validate and sanitize if you log the input (GUI form input, web service request,  or external database).
•  In case of attack what trail of forensic evidence is needed (e.g. IP address of the attack messages).
Know your baseline (typical log file growth in normal operation), plan log backup/removal and log rotation accordingly.


Please share your comment.

Source: Steve's blog http://soa-java.blogspot.com


References:


• Hacking Exposed Web Applications by Scambray et.al.


• How to break web software by Andrews & Whittaker

• OWASP Code Review Guide
• Improving Web Services Security (Microsoft patterns & practices) by Meier et.al
• XSD restrictions http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_facets.asp
• ISO 27001, ISO 27002

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